Glow in the Dark Paint

Using glow in the dark paint is easy once you have all the right materials. It's sorting that part out that's the tricky bit.

      After looking for months on the Internet and You Tube I decided to purchase a 'starter pack' from Glow Paint Industries here in Queensland.

      The starter pack came with eight 50gram packets of the following colours in powder form:-

Aqua- night colour - day colour is lemon, Pink, Green- night colour - day colour is lemon, Blue -night colour - day colour is lemon, Orange, Purple -night colour - day colour is white, Blue & Peach.

     Using the image below I will explain a few things about the powders.


When I can I will supply a photo of what this looks like in the dark.

  First, next to the splotches of colour is a pile of powder. This is to show you what the difference is in the colour from day colour and a night colour. The colour of the powder is the day colour. This can change slightly depending on the product you use to mix it with.

     When it comes to the blue, pink, peach and yellow I mixed it with some Polyurethane from Jo Sonja's Opal Dust as it was all I had at the time and I'm an impatient person and wanted to try it now, today, yesterday type of thing. 

     As you can see the powder (when mixed has darkened.) When I mixed it with Cabot's Cabothane Clear I was most disappointed. This is because the product has a grey/brown tinge to it. I used this product because I was attempting to save money and didn't know at the time that it had this tinge. It NEVER works. I've just cost me more money as I shall be going (as soon as I finish this blog) to purchase some crystal clear Polyurethane as I should have done in the first place and see how that goes. 

(I'm back. I could not get what I wanted but have purchased Derivan Matisse Polyurethane Satin Varnish which is white but dries clear and flexible. I have also purchased Winsor & Newton Artists' Acrylic Gloss UV Varnish. This is because I was told the polyurethane (if left in the sun) would eventually yellow and this is suppose to stop that from happening. I will need to experiment to see how it goes with the Glow in the Dark Paint.)

      These two images show you some gumnuts I am colouring at the moment. The bottom image shows white painted gumnuts. (I'm considering changing to Gesso as the white paint of choice, needs experimenting with. This is because I have found that using a house paint is to thin and needed two coats of paint. I also found that when I put the Glow In the Dark paint on (using the polyurethane that the very rim of the gumnut has bled some brown into the paint. It looks effective and I will enhancing the effect for the day light colouring of the fungi.) This is just a base colour I always paint over my gumnuts before I colour them with some other colour in this case green moss from Jo Sonja paints..


As it turns out the company supplying the powder recommends that it should be painted onto a white back ground and that you paint two coats of the powder. They also recommend not mixing the powders together as they say it gives the colour a muddy look.

      If you look at the inside of some of the green painted gumnuts you can see (in the image to the left) a pale yellow. Look to the top image and you will see that that is the 'green glow in the dark paint'. These gumnuts (for the sake of taking a photo of them) had a torch light held up to them for about a minute or two. Also this green powder glows in shadows where others (like puple, which is more like a pale white, only glows in pitch darkness.)

     Glow in the Dark Paints 'glow' because some source of light has been shining on them for a while. The company recommends that this should be done for 30mins to ensure that the paint glows for a long time, hours I'm told.

     One interesting thing I will be looking into is a UV LED. I am hoping that it does not shine a light that I can see. (This shows how much I DON'T know about them as the LED light is purple!) I really am hoping that I can hide the UV LED in amongst the shrubbery of my models and have the light shine down on a large patch of fungi painted with glow in the dark paint.  This is so that when my models are somewhere where there is very little light source it will not mater. Can you imagine a patch of purple or blue fungi. Yummy!!!
 (NO! It only shines a spot light onto a very small section of the mushrooms. The rest don't shine.)

    I will put up more images once I have finished painting them. Also just to let you know I'm very dissapointed in the purple and the orange. The purple is being very tricky. I thought I had it glowing but now I've lost it. The orange doesn't glow at all. Need experimenting with. P.S. The trick with the purple is to have it thick and place it in the sun.